THIS ELECTRIC LIFE

It was my cue to come out of the closet. Yes, I am a VITALIST. And have been for a very long time. What a scandal! A vitalist – a live one, one still alive, after all this time! How could he? – how could I?

I’m referring to two articles in New Philosopher #32 (my cue to de-closet, that is). Life force, page 14, referred to the great Bergson, my life hero, and made the lovely observation:

The thought of life as a sort of energy seems intuitively obvious. Living bodies seem to be animated by some sort of impetus or force that goes beyond the mere arrangement of their parts, and which disappears abruptly at death.

Then there was DBC Pierre, channelling E.M. Forster (page 46-7). Life is “life force”, “the power to endure”:

And where does life force come from? It clearly started somewhere before us. In evolutionary biology, the process of abiogenesis describes the transformation of non-living matter into life …… In the case of chemical water, the spark of life is thought to arise from a series of events, not all of which can be described ….. Yet all we truly know is that life ignites. We can’t say how or why.

Whence it came, what is it, this electric life? Vitalism asserts that life is not nothing – not merely an unusual material phenomenon – but something, of itself, sui generis. It is long discredited, of course – Bergson was the last vitalist to be taken (momentarily) seriously; since then it has been the realm of crackpots (like me) and pseudo-science.

LIFE IS NOT ENERGY, IT IS AGENCY, however. Think about it. Clearly life, living things, use energy, absolutely can’t live without it. The whole activity of life, from unicellular to multicellular, within every single cell of every single organism, is about capturing, storing, releasing, using energy. But life itself isn’t energy – rather life is the thing that fixes to do all this, it’s the instigator and driver of the process, the impetus, the will, the wilfulness of it. Yes, the agency.

Welcome to the élan vital, the “vital impetus” – aka “agency” – living bodies are animated not by energy – or (for that matter) by some sort of “vital substance”, or “vital principle” (as if an abstraction could animate anything!) – but by a real, live, living agency. This was Bergson’s simple, intuitively obvious observation. Not energy, agency!

You’re stunned. All these years you thought that vitalism was pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo which imagined a mysterious “life force” or “life energy”. But no, it’s just agency, simply agency. I mean nothing more by “agency” than the ordinary meaning of it, namely the raw wilfulness, self-directedness of organisms towards action, towards doing things off their own bat.  Everything from the pure, blind impulsiveness of a single-cell organism, hell-bent on surviving one more instant, to the conscious, intentional wilfulness of a defiant child or a stubborn old man. Life just wants to live, to do its own thing. Its vital agency is focussed, deep in its cells and organs, on garnering, harnessing energy, then it lets itself loose on an unsuspecting world. Look out! I am life, watch me grow, see me standing toe to toe ……

The fact is that the interaction of living agency with matter, the material world, is essentially energetic, so that when we “see” life, we “see” energy. “AS THE LIFE-FORCE SLOWLY SLIPS AWAY ……” – is how we describe what we feel and see when our loved one’s life ebbs away – our cat being euthanized at the vet, or our spouse exiting stage-left prematurely. But it is not a force, it is their agency, their vital impetus, that is slipping away – losing its ability to be in the world, because the energy-harnessing machinery of the body, especially in the brain, can no longer support its wildcat aspirations.

Bergson’s lovely vitalism – the simple idea that life is something not nothing, agency not energy – sounds utterly contrary to Darwinian orthodoxy, you’re probably thinking. But it absolutely isn’t, although that’s certainly how it was (mistakenly) interpreted back in the day. The great man was just trying to work out what life really is, not offering up an alternative theory of evolution. Darwinism is actually, already, the vitalist theory of life par excellence.

How so (you demand, as you drag your jaw up off the floor)? Well, yes, on the received view of Darwinism, all the work of moulding and refining life into its many shapes does seem to be down to the action of external, undirected, material forces – natural selection acting on the random variation-mutation of organisms. Life doesn’t so much evolve as get evolved, and any apparent agency it might have is ultimately just that – apparent.

But not so! Look a little closer. Far from doing nothing, LIFE, according to Darwin’s great theory, STRUGGLES, relentlessly, unceasingly, TO SURVIVE, to live one more instant – it is a mad, blind, one-track-mind will-to-survive – “Oh no, not I, I WILL SURVIVE!” This universal “struggle for existence” is the starting point, the central axiom of Darwinism – without it natural selection has nothing substantial, objective, real, to work on, to mould and refine into shape – just flabby, floppy, lifeless, gormless matter.

This is the very thing that thrills us when we watch a David Attenborough nature documentary – the spectacle, brought to life by the camera and by the great man’s hushed tones, of life’s amazing, heroic, creative, stubborn, blind struggle for existence. It turns out that not one jot of Darwinism changes when you realize that life is agency, not energy; quite the contrary, your understanding of it deepens and for the first time you start to zero in on what life really is. You’ll be so happy!

If so much hangs on the difference between two things – energy and agency – that look vaguely like each other, what exactly is that difference? Well, agency has something about it that energy absolutely doesn’t – INDIVIDUALITY. What we see is, everywhere, life tending to individuality: to individual cells, organs, organisms, species; differentiating, reproducing, proliferating, more and more every day – individual central nervous systems, individual bodies, individual creatures.

Energy, by contrast, is the most unindividual thing you could get. Waves of energy in the ocean, or in an electromagnetic field, might look individual, momentarily, but they’re not – they’re here today, gone tomorrow, really just “part of the main” – this is the essential idea of a continuous energy field in science. Energy can be converted between different forms – potential, kinetic, electrostatic, magnetic, etc. – but it’s all just the same immaterial stuff. Even matter is really energy (E = mc²).

Energy always, sooner or later, dissipates, loses its individuality, which was really only an appearance, only approximate, anyway – this is the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics. But life is agency, not energy; its individuality is real, part of its essential nature, so it doesn’t dissipate, is not subject to the Second Law. THE LIFE FORCE DEPARTS, THE BODY GOES COLD ……- whither it goes, this individual agency which is not force, energy? – who knows? – to the place of souls, perchance, beyond the portals of time and death?…..

Life is just not an energy to dissipate, to return whence it came, to the great blancmange of the universal field. This is the fallacy of inaccurate, careless observation; of scientific literalism; of a crude materialism that imagines only matter exists, or a wacky idealism that imagines only mind or spirit exists. Life is irreversible, indestructible, on a one-way ticket to a proliferating multitude – you’ll be pleased to know!

This is neither purpose nor purposelessness, in case you’re wondering. Bergson’s critique in Creative Evolution was as much of the traditional notion of a “divine plan” for evolution, as it was of the idea that natural selection alone could pull off the miracle of the species. Living agency, the élan vital, is pure push factor in a world where there’s nothing pulling us towards the future – no divine planner, no intelligent designer, no teleology – the non-existent God is as curious as us about how it’ll all turn out – “Surprise me!”, he says to life.

Yes, now I am getting carried away. Such an observation (that life is agency, not energy) changes nothing – Darwinism, this fruitful, beautiful scientific paradigm, will carry on regardless, mowing down problems and opening up new ways of seeing how life works – but it changes everything.

You’re starting to sense, I hope, that there is much more at stake here than a disreputable philosophical idea (vitalism) or a venerable old scientific theory (Darwinism). We come ultimately to the age-old, most pressing, existential questions – who am I?, what is life?, where are we going to?, what does it all mean? – which are explored not through science (primarily), rather through religion, philosophy, the arts, culture, life itself. But Bergson’s vitalism nails what after all is always the very first thing we want to know – YES, I EXIST! – life, this electrifying life, is something, not nothing – it is (have I said this before?) agency, not energy.

Can you feel it, deep inside? Don’t tell me you can’t.

July 2021